The removal of dirt and debris from streets, parking lots, airport runways, factory floors, and other similar paved surfaces, through the use of various types of street cleaning vehicles or factory sweeping vehicles, as may be the case, has been known for many years. For the sake of brevity, clarity and simplicity, such vehicles will be generally referred to in this document as surface cleaning vehicles. Conventional surface cleaning vehicles comprise a surface cleaning apparatus, such as a sweeping broom, a recirculating air type head, or a vacuum air head. Most commonly, such surface cleaning apparata are permanently mounted on a truck frame. Alternatively, such surface cleaning apparata are removably connected to a tractor, either securely attached to the three point hitch for direct turning with the tractor, or connected in freely pivoting relation to the towbar. The tractors being referred to are typically conventional unitary frame--or in other words are non-articulated--utility type tractors, manufactured by companies such as Ford, John Deere, Massey Ferguson, among others. Such conventional tractors are powered by an internal combustion engine that typically can produce about sixty-five to seventy horsepower.
Utility type surface cleaning vehicles have inherent cost and overall operational advantages over truck type surface cleaning vehicles in that the tractors can additionally be used to perform other tasks, such as ploughing snow, cutting grass, and so on. However, in spite of these advantages that are extremely important to the owners or operators of such vehicles, utility type surface cleaning vehicles are much less popular than truck type surface cleaning vehicles largely due to their lack of overall performance in prior art surface cleaning vehicles.
one significant performance related problem with utility type surface cleaning vehicles is that they tend to leave portions of a surface unswept by the gutter brooms as the vehicle tracks around corners, due to the improper geometric relationship between the gutter brooms, the front steerable wheels of the tractor and the surface cleaning apparatus--or in other words due to the placement of gutter brooms significantly ahead of the front wheels of the tractor. As can be seen in FIG. 1 (Prior Art), the tractor 10 has two gutter brooms 12 that are disposed forwardly of the front end of the tractor 10. As the tractor 10 tracks around the corner, it is necessary for the operator to look in a forward direction in order to watch the road in general and to view the gutter brooms 12 to ensure that the gutter brooms 12 are disposed in contacting relation with the curb 16. It is also necessary for the operator to look in a sideward direction to view the curb 16 and the rear wheels 14, in order to help maintain a proper steering relation with the curb 16. Further, it is also necessary for the operator to look in a rearward direction to ensure that no debris has been missed. With such prior art utility type surface cleaning vehicles, it is difficult to watch in each of these three stated directions frequently enough to have the gutter brooms 12 maintain contact with the curb 16 more than about half of the time, thus causing a significant amount of debris close to the curb 16 to be missed by the gutter brooms 12, which is unacceptable.
Another serious drawback with utility type surface cleaning vehicles is that the surface cleaning apparatus, the debris hopper, and the debris transfer apparatus are all positioned behind the tractor, and the gutter brooms are positioned in front of the tractor. Accordingly, the overall vehicle is quite long, which means that is difficult for such utility type surface cleaning vehicles to safely and properly manoeuver around objects on a city street, to accurately turn corners in a city block while maintaining one gutter broom properly against a curb, and so on.
Further, it is extremely difficult, to turn around such a utility type surface cleaning vehicle in a dead-end street, which is unacceptable.
Other utility type surface cleaning vehicles have the gutter brooms and the hopper located behind the tractor portion. Accordingly, it is necessary to look in a rearward direction to view the gutter brooms and the curb, which is very difficult, and even dangerous, considering it is necessary to look in a forward direction when driving.
It is therefore very important that utility type surface cleaning vehicles are as short as reasonably possible.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a utility type surface cleaning vehicle having a proper geometric relationship between the gutter brooms, the front steerable wheels of the tractor and the surface cleaning apparatus.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a utility type surface cleaning vehicle that has at least one gutter broom mounted thereon disposed rearwardly of said front limit of extent of the steerable front wheels.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide a utility type surface cleaning vehicle that is less lengthy than prior art utility type surface cleaning vehicles.